Patrick Finn, a 95-year-old Korean War veteran, watches from a wheelchair as a staff member uses a pencil to rub the name “Edmund Hubert Reilly” from the Wall of the Fallen onto a piece of paper.
US military archives call the Korean War “The Forgotten War,” though some 1.8 million Americans served during its three years – and more than 36,500 of them died, along with at least 200,000 South Korean, 400,000 North Korean and 600,000 Chinese troops.
But Finn, who fought in one of the war’s bloodiest battles, has never forgotten the Marine from Center Point, Iowa, who saved his life twice. He will carry his name back home to Minnesota.
Reilly came to Finn’s rescue twice on the icy battlefield of the Chosin Reservoir in late 1950, Finn says, once by pushing him to dig his foxhole deeper into the frozen ground.
“It was just like digging into concrete, but we did. And luckily, because it wasn’t long after we got settled in there, a mortar hit and if we had been any shallower, we would’ve been killed,” Finn says.
The second occasion also had to do with the cold, with temperatures as low as –35 degrees Fahrenheit (–37 degrees Celsius.)
“We were completely surrounded,” says Finn, who was a Marine reservist before the war. “I realized there was a Chinese soldier right to my left. So, I quickly rolled around to shoot him, and my gun just clicked. It was frozen.”
Reilly “shot him for me… He was my guardian angel.”
Reilly would be killed a few days later. “December 3rd, I think it was,” says Finn, who was just 19 years old at the time.
“He came into my life and he left … (and) saved it twice.”
If the war is forgotten in the US, Finn is adamant that in South Korea, it isn’t. And his presence in Seoul – a modern megacity unrecognizable from the 1950s – proves it.
He’s one of some 60 US veterans and their escorts invited by the Korean Ministry of Patriots and Veterans Affairs (KMPVA) on an all-expenses-paid trip to Korea as a thank you for their service – trips that happen four or five times a year.
On the final night of the September trip, Finn watches as a slight Korean man, Sohn Yang-young, rises to give a speech to a packed ballroom in the Ambassador Hotel in Seoul.
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Sohn is one of the so-called Kimchi babies, born to refugees aboard a cargo ship , the SS Meredith Victory, fleeing North Korea after the Chosin Reservoir battle.
“I believe that without the great courage and devotion from the (United Nations Command) veterans and the captain, I would never have been able to come into this world,” Sohn says. “I will never forget your kindness.”
It’s not the first time he has heard those sentiments during this trip.
At a banquet the previous night, a Korean man noticed the necktie Finn wears, which bears the moniker for survivors of Chosin Reservoir: “The Chosin Few.”
Finn says the man told him that his grandparents lived near the battlefield and were among the refugees evacuated in the wave that left along with the Meredith Victory. Finn and those fighting alongside him blunted the Chinese advance so the refugees could get out.
“You know, you gave me my life… I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for the Marines,” Finn recalls the man telling him.
“And that made things so worthwhile,” Finn says.
For many on the trip, it’s their first time back.
Elmore Brown, also 95, is one of them. He’s small in stature, large in presence. A blue cap, “Korea Veteran” emblazoned on it, rarely leaves his head.
Brown was a logger in Oregon before the war. During his time in Korea, he was at the front in some of its bloodiest engagements. Then a sergeant, he led a team of seven men – five Americans and two Koreans – laying communications wires from the front lines back to command posts in the rear.
There are things he’ll never forget, including the T-Bone battles of 1952 and ’53. China would lose thousands of men over the course of the campaign, and Brown describes the pitiless scene seven decades later.
Dead Chinese troops covered the battlefield, he says, “any place you wanted to look. No, they never picked them up… when you were there, you went ahead with a gun, and when you got shot, next guy picked your gun up and went ahead.”
Life or death was – at least in one instance – literally a coin flip.
Brown tells the story of having to choose between two communication lines that needed to be fixed, one to a switchboard and one to a lookout.
“Some guy said he had a quarter, so we flipped it and the quarter said we went towards the lookout,” Brown says.
Minutes later, enemy fire rained down on the route they would’ve taken to the switchboard – a life-saving flip of 25 cents.
The bonds forged during the war were not only with humans.
Brown says his team found a nest with two baby crows in a fallen tree.
“We didn’t want to let them starve, so we loaded them up and took them back to camp,” he says.
The crows quickly became a fixture of camp life, living uncaged in the GIs’ tents for three or four months, even waking them up for food when they got hungry – not always at convenient times.
“They didn’t know the time. Five o’clock in the morning,” Brown says with a smile.
But the man-bird bond only goes so far.
One day, a flock of birds flew over camp. The two crows rose up to join them, never looking back.
“Maybe it was their folk, I don’t know.”
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Ninety-three-year-old US Marine veteran John Foley is back in Korea with one key mission: To make sure his buddy Duane Dewey is not forgotten.
He eagerly recounts their time together, from boot camp on Parris Island and the train ride west to Camp Pendleton in California, to mountain warfare training in the Sierra Nevada. His eyes light up with the memories.
But once in Korea, the friends would be assigned to different battalions and see each other only occasionally in rear areas, Foley says.
On April 16, 1952, Dewey was badly wounded when he threw his body on a grenade to shield a Navy corpsman from the blast. He would survive and eventually be evacuated for medical treatment in the States.
Foley was at a different part of the front that day and would never see his friend again. Dewey died in 2021.
“Today it’s so much easier to stay in touch with people or friends or family. Back then, it wasn’t… When I left the Marine Corps, I went right into the police department in New York City. I was kind of like involved in my own life,” Foley says.
“I have a picture of him that I carry. I also have it in my phone, and I tell people because he was a really nice guy…”
“I wanted to tell his story,” Foley says, his voice breaking with emotion. “I want to still, he was still my friend.”
As the final banquet wraps up at the Seoul hotel, Foley scrolls through his phone, looking for that picture of Dewey.
It’s a photo of a newspaper clipping from 1953. President Dwight D. Eisenhower is presenting Dewey with the US military’s highest decoration, the Medal of Honor.
In the truest sense of the word, Duane Dewey was an American hero – and Jack Foley wants that to always be remembered.
It’s not just war veterans that the Korean government honors with trips back to the peninsula. Anyone who’s served since is eligible, too.
Raul Guerrero fits that description, serving in the US Army military police in 1968 , 15 years into a US-South Korean mutual defense arrangement that endures to this day.
On a warm, sunny afternoon, at a park not far from the demilitarized zone that has separated North and South since 1953, he shares his story.
On Halloween Day 1967, Guerrero says he and his friend dropped by a military recruiting office in El Paso, Texas, just to make some preliminary inquiries about joining up.
The recruiters said they should head to nearby Fort Bliss to take an aptitude test. But upon arrival, they inadvertently got mixed in with a busload of draftees arriving for their inductions.
A physical, some paperwork and an oath, and, by late afternoon, a sergeant said, “You’re in the Army now,” and the pair were off to boot camp – and, in a few months, South Korea, Guerrero says.
But he never regretted a minute of it. For one, it wasn’t Vietnam (this was at the height of that conflict); and two, the Korean people embraced him.
Patrolling neighborhoods of Daegu , outside a US base, Guerrero says he would be invited into Korean homes at a time when the country did not enjoy the standard of living it does today.
“They gave me whatever they had: Whey, some ramen, whatever food they had,” he says.
When his 12-month tour was up, he didn’t want to leave, and he asked assigners if he could remain.
“Can I stay here another six months? Can I extend? Can I extend?” he recalls saying. “They said, ‘You like it that much here?’ I said, ‘Yes, I want to stay here.’”
“Two weeks later, I was gone,” he laments, recalling crying on the train ride to Seoul to catch a plane to the US.
Fast forward 58 years to this past September at Incheon International Airport. Guerrero emerges from the customs area to a big sign: “Welcome veterans!”
“I lost it. The welcoming was so overwhelming. I actually started crying,” he says, the emotions catching him again under the afternoon sun.
During Guerrero’s first time in South Korea, the country was still in the early days of its postwar modernization. Daily life was still a mix of old and new: Apartment complexes were being built among old traditional hanok houses; people were either dressed in modern-style outfits or traditional hanbok.
He talks of what Korea has become in those six decades – gleaming skyscrapers, advanced technologies, even K-pop.
“I feel that I’ve had some type of connection … (with) what’s going on now, that I was part of this, maybe a little small part.”
“How many other American citizens came by, soldiers come by and done this, worked with this? You know, thousands, thousands of us. And it’s just beautiful. It’s just real beautiful.”
After the KMPVA program in Seoul and the surrounding region ended, Elmore Brown and his grandson traveled south to Busan, where Brown first landed in Korea 74 years ago.
The grandson, Paul Marlow, recounted that part of Brown’s journey to CNN.
Brown, with the “Korea Veteran” cap still on his head, was called the “Champion Soldier” by people he met and honored at every turn, Marlow said.
A taxi driver who chauffeured them around the region’s sights was 74 years old and a Busan native, “possibly an infant or was born shortly after Elmore’s arrival to Busan,” Marlow wrote, noting the implausible happenstance.
The driver made sure Brown got up-close access to whatever he wanted to see – “he never took no for an answer,” Marlow says – and their hotel comped meals and lounge access.
One evening at dinner, as they went to pay, they were told the bill was already taken care of. A Korean family dining nearby had wanted to show their gratitude.
“Elmore was in shock at the love and kindness showed,” Marlow said.
“Even outside of the official program the people and culture shined through on how proud they are to be Korean, and how grateful they are for the veterans that fought for their present-day way of life!” Marlow wrote.
“After seeing how well Korea has done after the war, Elmore repeated many times that his service was indeed ‘worth it,’ that sadly the lives lost were ‘worth it,’ as it elevated the Korean people to what they have today.”
